HAVING a meltdown in SQL

Credential and data fetishes; the new definition of technical skill; growth in crisis

Apr 19, 2026

Downwardly mobile elites and the coming instability

Most people derive their identities from institutional or group membership — careers and social lives are nothing without them.

And that’s fine, though it makes identity contingent on continued membership. What happens when those sources of identity fall away? I’ve been figuring that out for probably the last five years.

Peter Turchin’s thesis of elite overproduction is appearing everywhere these days, but here’s what those people aren’t saying: the downwardly mobile elites this time will be skill-poor and credential-rich single women who have little recourse but to demand that society make up for their skill deficits.

This will be far worse than Occupy Wall Street, which Musa Al-Gharbi argued was an expression of elite frustration at people above, because there were far fewer positions to achieve their aspirations than there were people who wanted those jobs. This time, it will be women who feel entitled to the lifestyles they already have, and there’s a vast difference between those who expected a certain lifestyle without having experienced it and those who experienced and then lost it.

Thorstein Veblen also predicted this in his description of the consumption habits of elites, right below the aristocrats, in Theory of the Leisure Class. Professional elites need to signal their aspirations to join the aristocratic class through consumption. If they’re women, they need enough income to sustain their competition with other women of their class. There will be far fewer who can do so, compounding the sense of loss of status.

Merit doesn’t matter — I learned this, finally, at 38

The messages women get not only encourage them to remain trapped in institutions that will never reward them but also create the illusion that more credentials will help them advance. Credentials have never been more of a waste of time and money.

It has never been more important in the history of women’s labor participation for us to snap out of our deference to institutions.

They will never be meritorious, and they will extract competent women’s cognitive and emotional labor for as long as we let them.

I know several technical women who haven’t realized their potential due to structural biases that no DEI program can remedy or recognize. Nor can we see the true problem through the feminist frame for professional work.

The trend has been that women cluster in skill-poor areas, and tend to have placed their faith in credentials. I say this knowing women who are about to be middle-aged and have hit a career ceiling, who might think that credentials are the best way to ‘reskill’.

As for institutions, I have finally had to accept that merit will never matter and can work against me, especially when paired with insufficient social deference to the institution itself. Many women eventually hit a ceiling as I have.

My meltdown stemmed from the realization that I’m capable of so much more than I’ve been able to do.

The reason is twofold: my true skills are illegible to institutions because they can’t be measured or credentialed, and because the current technological moment calls precisely for those skills.

My judgment has never been more valuable, and never less socially desired. I’ve written before that in the age of AI, we’ve handed over our judgment faculties to machines in the moment they’re needed most. This is also a time when the competent woman with sound judgment is poised to reap disproportionate rewards, even as the culture tells us the opposite.

For the love of god, don’t go to business school

Unless there’s ample evidence that the credential is the only path into an area with sustained demand for that skill, this is a bad idea. Business school is definitely inadvisable. Certificates are also inadvisable. An example of an exception: a friend who has spent her career in the nonprofit space and has three kids is reskilling in medical physics, a field that requires her to earn a degree. But the area will sustain long-term demand, making the credential a defensible choice with potential ROI.

Does your path have ROI? That’s question one, obnoxious and corporate as it sounds.

Credentials don’t open doors as we think, and the current crisis of higher education should make us pause before signing up for another. Despite the ceiling, I’ve been gathering skills over the past decade that will help now that generalists are poised to gain disproportionately from labor market restructuring.

Placing this much stock in credentials made a modicum of sense when jobs were fully gated behind them (though they shouldn’t have been). Credentials now have diminishing returns because their requirement is indefensible. What is defensible: a demonstration of technical skills along with LLM tool fluency. This has basically become non-negotiable, and I know many women in adjacent fields who have successfully reskilled, like in product management and UX. But this isn’t a rule. I know one woman who took an AI engineering course, is working in a new area of AI dev, and turned her entire life around. I admire her greatly, and you should read Lily ’s writing.

There are three types of women in this moment. Most don’t have analytical skills or aren’t exercising them. Those who do are finding the right outlets to make those skills apparent, often outside standard institutions, and taking risks. There are also those with analytical skills who haven’t found the correct path.

But women like me, who already have an analytical inclination and emotional intelligence,1 are even better poised than most men to exploit the current moment. The catch is that we also have to tolerate the risk of existing outside the institutions from which we once derived our identities.

We have started to see arguments that soft skills are even more important than they were, but that’s not the full story. Soft skills have always been important, but their value depends on what they’re paired with. Those who have gotten by on soft skills — areas disproportionately filled with women — no longer will, because symbolic capital can’t be the basis of career capital anymore. Those with applied analytical skills and people skills will thrive.

This is a weird fucking time.

Think of the women in marketing, for example — that area is highly concentrated with women, and many have in-demand skills because everything is advertising. But many more skate by on process-focused jobs, as I saw when I worked in marketing. In my experience in that area, there was a vanishingly small number of women who could use complex tools and reason about data. I’ve mentored some of these women to go further. I got here, ironically, by reasoning really fucking well about data without any formal training. It’s possible to do, and it’s just recognizing patterns.

Women in dual-income partnerships with men possessing skills will also be fine, even if they have to take a step down in their careers. This is the moment that will test the feminist conception of egalitarianism within a relationship. I suspect we will have far more women in dual-income households who are out of work or underemployed. Many of them will not have children to occupy them, creating more time to stew in resentment. Things will get far worse before they get better for upper-middle-class women as a whole.

Technical skills aren’t just coding languages.

Also, let’s stop fetishizing data.

The illegibility that traps many women in institutional misery was the same that I lived through these last three years since I entered consulting. Despite being specialized in orchestrating the movement of data through systems, I had avoided work involving query construction for its movement. I was incentivized and pressured to give it to cheaper developers because it would take me longer.

Turns out the opposite.

Though I’ve been miserable daily, I’ve never had as accomplished a year as the past twelve months. I nevertheless burned myself out thinking that if only I could achieve enough, I’d be accepted at work.

I can claim to be a data architect and a technical architect in the Salesforce world2. I am also very good at selling technical solutions despite internal turmoil, which has led to the most complex technical projects I’ve yet had to do, even as I worked through daily tears. There was something deeply satisfying in the work, which is how I know I’m meant to do it. It’s not as simple as corporations being evil or capitalism sucking. The work can still be satisfying.

The technical skill here isn’t SQL, but the ability to analyze data at all, knowing what shape it needs to be in versus what it is, and constructing the logic to get there.

Technical skills are logical skills, but we’ve been thinking of them merely as the acquisition of coding languages. But those languages follow a pattern that requires creating logical statements using that particular syntax. The language itself isn’t the skill, and in the AI age, we ought to evolve what we consider ‘technical skills’.

Data is also as biased as humans inferring patterns of behavior about groups — it reflects the stereotypes of what the people in the org think is valuable. We just like to pretend it’s neutral and an objective representation of reality because it’s derived from a table. The papers people think make an argument more legitimate are the same: humans are biased in what they collect as rows in the tables analyzed in those papers. Those biases are not only personal, but institutional, and create the fucked up data that organizations buy my labor to fix.

These last two months, I willed much shitty data into coherence under impossible conditions. This was a truly fucked up thing to have to do because of the lack of identifiers and primary keys. This was also the period when I walked manically around the park, talking to myself.

I hope more than ten people can understand that particular frustration. Businesses worship data, to make those “data-driven decisions”, which is an idiotic professional class expression of what in regular English would be an ‘informed decision’. But even that term implies that, otherwise, people would make uninformed decisions without spreadsheets, which is just silly.

During this period, however, I also realized that, as a woman in a technical role who doesn’t adhere to the social script assigned to me, I’m always going to struggle.3 It’s not the function that causes the friction, but my colleagues’ social experience of me. Ironically, my personality is what allows me to run a team, sell, and deliver the work. I enjoy finding diamonds in the rough. I have an absolute fetish for elegant systems and structures, and it’s why my writing is about patterns. The earliest pattern recognition skill I honed was about people.

Those abilities are responsible for where I am in life, and the sad thing is that institutions can’t see it in anyone, not just me. Because it’s illegible. What institutions can’t measure doesn’t exist.

Therefore, not only do people with strong abilities across domains get overlooked, but women, in particular, struggle to have their analytical abilities recognized.4 My ability to think in systems can’t be measured, so it goes unnoticed, and I intellectually suffocate.

Depression isn’t an identity, though when I was a feminist, I almost made it mine. And I see many women around me struggling with similar mental health issues, sometimes stemming from similar realizations to the above.

In such a time, regardless of sex, structurelessness is the enemy. If you are going through something similar, the pull to just wallow in it and disappear from people’s lives is strong. I’m reading and writing instead, and making a great effort to spend more time with women, especially those I’ve met recently. This is because female friendship offers women something that no man, partner, or friend can.

There’s an emotional closeness between women that only exists in that space, even if groups of women don’t accept me. I can’t withdraw, and I can’t succumb to depression-induced nihilism. On the one hand, I recognize that no one cares about me in the abstract, but on the other, people do. Those you invest time in who do the same for you — those people do care, even if I struggle to reach out to them in times like this.

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